The Wandering Jew — Volume 10 eBook

In a word, those delightful faces, which the flowery
pencil of Greuze could alone have painted in all their
velvet freshness, were now worthy of inspiring the
melancholy ideal of the immortal Ary Scheffer, who
gave us Mignon aspiring to Paradise, and Margaret
dreaming of Faust. Rose, leaning back on the
couch, held her head somewhat bowed upon her bosom,
over which was crossed a handkerchief of black crape.
The light streaming from a window opposite, shone
softly on her pure, white forehead, crowned by two
thick bands of chestnut hair. Her look was fixed,
and the open arch of her eyebrows, now somewhat contracted,
announced a mind occupied with painful thoughts.
Her thin, white little hands had fallen upon her knees,
but still held the embroidery, on which she had been
engaged. The profile of Blanche was visible,
leaning a little towards her sister, with an expression
of tender and anxious solicitude, whilst her needle
remained in the canvas, as if she had just ceased to
work.

“Sister,” said Blanche, in a low voice,
after some moments of silence, during which the tears
seemed to mount to her eyes, “tell me what you
are thinking of. You look so sad.”

“I think of the Golden City of our dreams,”
replied Rose, almost in a whisper, after another short
silence.

Blanche understood the bitterness of these words.
Without speaking, she threw herself on her sister’s
neck, and wept. Poor girls! the Golden City of
their dreams was Paris, with their father in it—­Paris,
the marvellous city of joys and festivals, through
all of which the orphans had beheld the radiant and
smiling countenance of their sire! But, alas!
the Beautiful City had been changed into a place of
tears, and death, and mourning. The same terrible
pestilence which had struck down their mother in the
heart of Siberia, seemed to have followed them like
a dark and fatal cloud, which, always hovering above
them, hid the mild blue of the sky, and the joyous
light of the sun.

The Golden City of their dreams! It was the place,
where perhaps one day their father would present to
them two young lovers, good and fair as themselves.
“They love you,” he was to say; “they
are worthy of you. Let each of you have a brother,
and me two sons.” Then what chaste, enchanting
confusion for those two orphans, whose hearts, pure
as crystal, had never reflected any image but that
of Gabriel, the celestial messenger sent by their
mother to protect them!

We can therefore understand the painful emotion of
Blanche, when she heard her sister repeat, with bitter
melancholy, those words which described their whole
situation: “I think of the Golden City of
our dreams!”